Curatorial & Editorial Philosophies

CURATION

Short

Through contributor submissions and editorial acquisitions inspired by thoughtful research, critical reflection, investigation, and intriguing discovery, we’ll share ideas, practices, theories, and guidelines that encourage play, collaboration, and conversation while reforming knowledge sharing cultures. While Commonplace will never claim to have true or full understanding of the ever-shifting environments, we strive to curate the right questions being asked and clearly articulated proposed solutions.

Long

The landscape of knowledge sharing and dissemination is expansive. With the increasing focus and practice of multi-cross-inter-disciplinary studies, it’s even more challenging to follow what’s going on or even where to go to learn about what’s going on given the fragmented nature of social platforms.1 Moreover, critique floods the ecosystem partially rightly so given the many challenges and limitations of current infrastructures. There are few publications in the scholarly communications space that seek explicitly to focus on emerging models and to spark the inspiration and sustain the momentum needed for change.

Through curated and co-created essays, series, podcasts, and other formats, Commonplace aims to be movement toward knowledge sharing futures and the cultures that sustain them. Through contributor submissions and editorial acquisitions inspired by thoughtful research, critical reflection, investigation, and intriguing discovery, we’ll share ideas, practices, theories, and guidelines that encourages play, collaboration, and conversation while reforming knowledge sharing cultures. The totality of this publication, as such, explores not just the ideas themselves, but how they fit into the stories and events of knowledge and culture towards more inclusive, open, and optimistic futures.

As Montaigne observed: “We have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it.” Not that Commonplace will ever claim to have true or full understanding of the ever-shifting environments, we aim to curate the right questions being asked and clearly articulated proposed solutions. Note the plurality: questions and solutions. We take a slow-journalism approach that — rather than reacting to news and hot-takes — prefers viewpoints and strategies that begin with the end in mind and contain clear intermediates that account for current systems and thoughtfully envision the consequences their propositions.

We also certainly have our own spheres of influence and bias as a publication of Knowledge Futures, a nonprofit that builds public digital infrastructure. With Commonplace taking the role of auteur of curation, we aim to be transparent about our conflicts of interest while buffering against them with the support and guidance of KF members, and the influence of the zeitguist at large. As a futures-oriented publication, we encourage any and all possibilities that could serve an equitable knowledge economy and and are interested in actionable items that can be applied to create social infrastructure towards more open and equitable publishing systems, and are likewise learning about knowledge design and cultures as they emerge on our radars.

In particular, this looks like:

• Keeping an eye on what PubPub Communities are most active and engaged with,

• Sharing thoughts and concepts that Members and potential Members are curious to learn more about,

• Continuing the conversations that are happening on social platforms (Substack, Twitter, … ) that are within our network,

• Identifying provocative and interesting ideas and strategies that are found through our own independent interests, and

• Using our trained intuition on what is and feels important to share.

EDITORIAL

See our Style Guide for specifics.

We are lucky to be able to engage in a process of revision with our Commonplace authors. Our editorial team is full of curiosity and excitement about your ideas and ready to discuss and dive into them fully with you. We use a collaborative approach to revision and feedback that is timely, thus allowing for quick publication timelines.

Once we receive your submission, we take you through our brief but thorough editorial process involving structural edits for readability, some comments to clarify or reframe ideas for our audience, and copy editing grammar. We strive to maintain your authorial voice as we feel this is important to communicating your unique perspective.

Most of our articles are not peer reviewed, but we will, at times, ask an expert in a related field to review a draft for us if we believe it would strengthen or validate a piece. In fact, we publish hoping that Commonplace readers will annotate, comment, and discuss with one another points raised in our publications — in effect conducting an open review. We believe this transparent, community-honed sense of shared understanding and debate is central to moving forward in bringing about better, alternate, and shared knowledge futures.

And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, 
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity, 
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)

— T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”